“Hard” science fiction is a form of writing with constraints: in this case; the constraints being that the physics have to be believable. It keeps the genre separate from “science fantasy” e.g. Star {Wars, Trek}–which are enjoyable in their own right, but quite different. You can assure yourself that the standard science-related plot devices of time travel, superluminal communication, or infinite energy aren’t introduced because they frequently poke holes in the plot. And it’s often interesting to see how authors create creative workarounds to stay within the bounds that hard science fiction imposes.
I've always wondered why physics is given primacy here - what is the point if your space travel is plausible but your biology is full of magical thinking? Beyond that lots of 'hard SF' is full very unsophisticated thinking about economies, social constructs, politics, etc.
I think this doesn't reflect poorly on the authors so much as on how difficult it is to get all of this stuff right, even with a ton of research. One advantage mainstream fiction has in this regard is that by relying on a backdrop of "real world" events they will at least pass a sniff test even if you as the author haven't put much thought into it. Not that spec. fiction. authors don't crib extensively from history etc., also - but the desire to demonstrate the alien nature of things often unravels quickly as an author reaches the limits of their expertise/time/research abilities.
I think it is one of the weaknesses of novel (let alone series) length work in this area that you can't help but expose the holes in the artifice. It's ok, readers have suspension of disbelief, but a strength of short fiction here is that you don't end up building in implausible or contradictory content in background material.
It is interesting when a SF author chooses to try and get some other part of the world "right": e.g. Vinge, Butler, Stross, etc.
> I've always wondered why physics is given primacy here - what is the point if your space travel is plausible but your biology is full of magical thinking?
It's purely audience demand. If your readers like physics and themselves hold magical beliefs about biology, they'll enjoy thinking about your physics and won't notice the problems in your biology.
>> It keeps the genre separate from “science fantasy” e.g. Star {Wars, Trek}–which are enjoyable in their own right, but quite different.
Being a staunch Trekkie, I protest. You can't put Star Wars in the same sub-genre as Star Trek! For instance, a common categorisation would have to explain the distinct absence of Ewoks or cute robots from Star Trek [1] or the much reduced focus on technology in Star Wars [2]. While (according to the wikipedia page on Science Fantasy) Star Trek is sometimes labelled as Science Fantasy, it's clear the aim of the show is completely different than the aim of Star Wars. I mean, one is an adventure with space swords and space knights, the other is ... an adventure, but with space captains and space lieutenants.
So very different.
____________
[1] I doubt anyone would consider Lt. Cmndr. Data a "cute robot" and anyway, he's an android.
[2] See: "the tech is overteching" (copied here so you can avoid opening that atrocious syfy.com page):
"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't
work."
Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
"And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."
P.S. I know my comment comes along as a bit ironic, but I really see a difference between Star Wars and Star Trek and the kind of SciFi they represent. My best attempt at an explanation: in Star Wars, starships are cool. In Star Trek, how starships work is cool.
So this in part comes down to what novelists call a “type of conflict” that Trek makes great use of, but Wars does not. The term is usually “Man vs. Technology conflict” but if I were writing it, I would call it “people versus tools” to clarify that usually fighting off a robot counts as one of the other conflicts. Like if you have to land a plane, that is PvTool conflict.
In Star Wars, this conflict is largely but not entirely absent. In a climactic scene of A New Hope, the rebels get to blow up the Death Star, except—“It didn’t go in. Just impacted on the surface.” Very short bursts in the middle of other conflict. Similarly there is a short moment of Han Solo explaining that he needs to give his computer time to make hyperspace calculations lest they all die—it is another really tiny moment to enhance a larger existing conflict.
Whereas with Trek it is usually more pronounced, “no one has ever done those things with these tools, how do we even begin to do it?” ...
A lot of the rest of the apparent difference comes down to format. The Trek that we remember had to be rushed and crushed. The episodes were short and the TV stations reserved the right to show them out of order, so just like virtually all TV off that time, there was typically a short circular arc by which everyone at the end of the episode must more or less be however they started.
One really interesting thing someone pointed out to me about reality TV was that it was extremely cognitively complex for its time, and indeed this was its selling point. People watched Survivor because something changed as a result of every episode and there was a lot of mental stimulation of the form “ooh I wonder who would be the best strategic target for him to take out?!” . There was a little of this in other places; I like to think about how we used to debate whether a French chef should really challenge Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai, or whether he should have the audacity to fight the nearly undefeatable Iron Chef Japanese Rokusaburo Michiba. But even those shows returned mostly to the same place week after week.
After some thought over the years, I've come to the conclusion that "Star Trek" isn't hard or soft or anything else. Individual episodes of Star Trek are hard or soft or whathaveyou. From that perspective, there are plenty of episodes where it's reasonably hard and plenty where it's as soft as a cooked noodle (see the many episodes set in places where thoughts become reality, just about the softest concept you could ask for). It should really be looked at more as a compilation than a single work.
I also can't think of a single episode where it was rock-hard. There has always been a lot of fuzz in how fast the Enterprise can actually travel, for instance, that a truly hard series would need to commit to, even in the context of an episode. Even when they try to set for a particular story that the Enterprise could get to this destination in X hours, it's still soft because if they just try harder there's always more that can be pulled out of the engines if necessary.
>There has always been a lot of fuzz in how fast the Enterprise can actually travel, for instance
Been watching some of the original series and next generation lately. Next generation definitely focusses more on consistancy and explaining how the 'tech' works. I've noticed a lot of TOS is completely inconsistent with the technology and abilities of different things and even people between one episode to the next. TNG, at least for the most part, seems to try and keep the explanations more 'realistic' and consistent between episodes, at least from what i've noticed.
My kids want to get into Star Trek, and I had them at least sample The Original Series just so they had some idea of what the "Next" generation is. One of the handful we watched was the Naked Now, the original story in which the crew gets a disease that makes everyone like super drunk, which was followed on in the second episode of TNG. Even ignoring the planet exploding for no reason, and its mass wildly fluctuating (huh-what now?), the episode ends in the Enterprise restarting its engines in a tearing hurry by "imploding" them, which causes them to go so fast they go back in time three days. I had forgotten about that! Moreover, the only reason they go back in time three days is that's when they chose to stop; there is no reason to believe they couldn't have continued on much longer. Forget slingshotting around the sun in a dangerous manner, there's a TOS episode that establishes that Kirk can damn near simply radio down to Scotty and tell him to rig the engines to travel back in time again. They even rhapsodize at the end of the episode about how amazingly useful such a thing might be in the future!
(I run on the theory that if the Enterprise can accidentally do it, even if it is risky, surely you can build a thing to do it deliberately if you try.)
(TBH I don't love where Star Trek is right now, but they've got a long way to go before they run out.)
Hmmm maybe it's more of a Roddenberry era trek vs later trek kind of thing. That was an early episode of TNG from when he was still alive. Star trek kind of changed direction after that. I liked the later series, but they did lack something the original series and early TNG had.
>(TBH I don't love where Star Trek is right now, but they've got a long way to go before they run out.)
I just wish they'd continue the story after Voyager instead of going further and further back in time. It seems pointless to me. We already know what's going to happen. I never was a big fan of prequels in general, but it just seems worse with star trek.
On the other hand, Star Wars is mostly free of time travel plots while they're quite common in Star Trek. Time travel, while theoretically possible, is mostly used to introduce elements of fantasy into science fiction.
Alas, that's not what "hard" SF means these days (or even since the 1960s). Consider the "known space" stories and novels by Larry Niven, who is pretty firmly pigeon-holed as a hard SF author: they're full of magic wands, devices that break the known laws of physics -- to which he makes the sole concession of at least striving for internal consistency.
"Hard SF" is a term I'm deeply suspicious of; it originated in the late 1950s/early 1960s in the US SF publishing field as a twitchy counterpoint to the "New Wave" then appearing, as previous social taboos began to crumble -- "hard" had connotations of two-fisted manly-man engineers with slide-rules clenched between their jaws, support for the Vietnam War, and the implicit technocrat agenda espoused by the racist and sexist John W. Campbell, editor of Analog (the de-facto house magazine of the hard SF tribe), who over a 30-40 year period used SF to promote a white supremacist and ultra-capitalist agenda (hint: Heinlein's "Fifth Column" was written to an outline provided by Campbell, and Heinlein apparently toned down the racism in it, so it's now merely a screamingly racist "yellow peril" yarn).
There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers:
It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today.
(PS: gratuitous appeal to authority: I'm a multiple Hugo-winning SF author, and I write SF novels for a living. If you don't recognize my name, go feed "Charles Stross" into wikipedia before you downvote.)
> There are some rare exceptions within the hard SF sub-genre -- where the science was diamond-hard and the author didn't use it as a platform for some sort of far right political agitprop -- but they're dismayingly rare; for more on this phenomenon see Michael Moorcock's seminal essay, Starship Stormtroopers:
What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
Also, I'm convinced that people who are convinced that Starship troopers is a fascist tract have only watched the movie uncritically, or have bothered to read the book, but have no concept of what military people are like. The best way to understand Starship Troopers is as Helmet for My Pillow or another of the countless WW2 memoirs, but in space. That's the narrative structure it follows.
> It says something about our desire for the fantastika that "Star Wars" (space wizards! Evil emperors!) is infinitely more popular than this stuff today
Strong counterpoint would be the Expanse. It's never going to dethrone a forty year old franchise backed by the biggest media company in the world, but it is proving more popular than I would have expected.
> What do Heinlein and hard science fiction have to do with each other? He's far, far out on the squishy end.
The first paragraph of Heinlein's Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein says "he was among the first to emphasize scientific accuracy in his fiction, and was thus a pioneer of the subgenre of hard science fiction."
Going the other way, the entry for "Hard science fiction" at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction includes his "The Past Through Tomorrow" collection of stories and "The Rolling Stones" as representative of hard science fiction.
Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy.
It would be much more difficult for a hard sci-fi series to gain the kind of traction that Star Trek and Star Wars do, simply because the kinds of story it can tell are much more constrained...and it doesn’t allow for the same kind of wow factor.
> Science fantasy is largely more popular because a lot of what humans want out of their stories is just that: fantasy.
I kind of disagree. What people want out of their stories is something that resonates with them emotionally or that speaks to the human condition. The fantasy vs science dichotomy doesn't really apply, and it's mostly subjective anyway.
Also, it helps to remember that Star Wars and Star Trek were pioneering in their respective media. Star Wars basically invented the motion picture blockbuster and "epic" sci-fi. Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
But both are also far more about people than technology or even extrapolation. If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings - it's actually a fairly grounded universe - and there are many such settings that somehow allow for telepaths as well. It's entirely possible to have hard sci-fi that has a wow factor and human drama (Babylon 5 comes to mind as an attempt, maybe the Expanse,) it's just not something people want to do because science is difficult, whereas teching the tech is easy.
> Star Trek, for all its hokey technobabble, was the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
Star Trek (TOS, this changed a bit with TNG and DS9) didn't even make the society the main characters were part of an important focus, it was more focused on external-societies-of-the-week, and more as a vehicle for commentary than as internally consistent, fleshed out models.
> If you take away the Force and the space wizards, most of what happens in Star Wars
...wouldn't happen, because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.
>and more as a vehicle for commentary than as internally consistent, fleshed out models.
Fair enough, but TOS was more internally consistent and fleshed out than the anthology series of the time, and taken more seriously than Lost in Space. No one on the Enterprise got turned into a talking carrot, Kirk would never stand for such tomfoolery.
>because the entire plot is the conflicting machinations of factions of Force-using space wizards.
I don't know... without that, you've still got an intergenerational conflict between two rival houses (Skywalkers and Palpatines,) which is standard space opera fare. The Force as religion and politics could still be a driving factor without tangible manifestations of the supernatural, as that already happens in the real world.
You could even go the Babylon 5 route and pull the "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" card and call the Jedi "technomages." They're just doing some weird thing with quantum (mumble) that we don't understand.
Star Wars must at least share the "invented the motion picture blockbuster" status with Jaws, which came out the year before.
Star Trek TOS was not that internally consistent or realistic.
Consider that within a couple of years they discovered that Jack the Ripper had actually been due to a non-corporeal alien, that aliens had visited Ancient Greece, resulting in the Greeks worshiping them as gods, and that Methuselah, Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, and Brahms were all the same person, still alive at about 6,000 years old .. and that Cochrane was still alive.
The odds that there are many others alien visitors, and ultra-long-lived humans, is very high. That should have a big impact on how humans try to understand their own history and cultural evolution, but it's never mentioned.
Or, think about how the ancient Greek myths influenced the later Roman ones, and how the Roman culture influenced even the German culture nearly 2,000 years later. The strong similarities between human history and the Roman-like culture of 'Bread and Circuses' (with the gladiator having the Greek name Achilles) and Nazi Germany ("Patterns of Force") or even US culture, as in 'The Omega Glory' with the Yankees and Communists, and holy words identical to the US Pledge of Allegiance and Preamble to the Constitution seemly written on Omega IV several hundred years before they were written on Earth.
This is hand-waved as Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development. Given that we know that aliens influenced Earth history, and other planets seem to have a similar history, shouldn't they be thinking how odd it is to still have parallel development? Does it mean that equally powerful aliens are affecting all of the other cultures too? Why don't humans meet any of them?
And, if mental powers can be created through an injection, why aren't more people doing it? Where is the research into understanding how that works?
> the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.
> most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings
I don't understand energy in Star Wars.
Why don't the imperial troops fire at the escape pod? So what if no life was detected. It's ret-conned that droids aren't allowed to use escape pods. But you can still place the plans in the droid, turn it off on a timer, stick it in the escape pod, and eject the pod, yes?
We know droids can be shut down because C-3PO shuts himself down for the night to conserve power. They've got two suns, plenty of land, and no excess solar power? And it's relatively cheap to get a flight off the planet, which requires loads of power - and potential energy is easily converted to kinetic. So, why is it accepted that C-3PO needs to save power?
The short lived tv series SeaQuest DSV suffered terribly from the need to have believable science but at the same time the need for fantasy to make the story interesting. After the first few episodes, they mainly failed and started finding excuses to shoehorn outer space into plots. I loved the idea of the show but the execution makes me wonder if the problem was with limited talent or if hard sci-fi is just very difficult, especially for the visual format.
Unrelated to anything else, someone I went to school with (in a small-town high school way in Upstate NY, nowhere near Hollywood or NYC or anywhere else TV-connected) was actually closely related to the producer (or director, or something) of that series, and guest starred in an episode when we were in 8th grade.
I wasn't commenting on Heinlein, I was commenting on John W. Campbell, who was basically the go-to editor for hard SF (and had an Agenda, capital-A intentional).
The Expanse is popular because -- surprise! -- even a niche market can be a large market when it's a niche in a billion person audience.
Andy Weir's "The Martian" was hard sf. Aside from a couple of inconsistencies which were necessary for the plot to evolve, everything else was rock solid.
A lot of people write hard sf. Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorites.
I think 'hard SF' is usually afforded a couple of 'gimmes' in the sense of rule breaking. I imagine most people would place Rendezvous With Rama, for instance, in this class despite (spoilers, hah) the reveal of Rama's voodoo propulsion mechanism. Niven's books, while fun, push this way beyond what I'd normally concede to be 'hard' but then maybe I'm out of touch.
Also just wanted to say I really enjoyed Accelerando, and the Laundry Files series is amazing so far (although I don't know how far I'll get if it keeps getting darker!) Thanks for all your good work.
I mean, Rendezvous with Rama tries its best to place Rama's reactionless system in the context of currently known physics, using distortion of the fabric of space as its cause. But even including that, the important part is that the protagonists don't get access to the same technology; for example, the Endeavor didn't get to cheat its way out of its hyperbolic escape orbit (it had to be rescued by suicide tanker vessels). So while it's technically "soft" in this aspect it doesn't affect the plot.
I'd love to see a list of what you consider your favorite works or authors in the mundane SF genre or that you might consider good examples of "diamond hard non-agitprop" SF.
I've really enjoyed (and reread) your novels and I'm a longtime fan of the works of Kim Stanley Robinson. Even though James A. Corey only sort of qualifies as "mundane SF" given the super alien tech, I really enjoyed the parts of his books where stellar orbits, transit times and such are treated as important parts of the plot.
I'm not cstross, but you could check out Greg Egan. He's got a number of stories set in universes that don't even have the same number of dimensions as ours (4 spatial dimensions, zero time dimensions, or 2 spatial dimensions, 2 time dimensions), where this deeply matters and directly impacts the plots, and all the mathematics is deeply worked out for these sorts of universes and also impacts the plot. See, for instance, https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html , and all the pages it links to. And that's just an example, there are some "lighter weight" ones that under normal circumstances would still be considered fairly "heavy", just not as heavy as literally working out how General Relativity works in different numbers of dimensions for the story.
His politics I would estimate as reasonably similar to the HN gestalt.
Thanks, I always appreciate having authors recommended.
I read all kinds of SF regardless of politics and scientific accuracy. I often find authors whose politics I don't agree with give me the most insight into other ways of seeing and understanding the world.
I just love the idea of orbital mechanics, coriolis effects and zero g environments as plot points. I also wish there were SF video games that utilized a mundane SF solar system as a setting.
I read widely without much regard for politics (as long as the story is not simply a disguised political polemic, which I've come to find boring even if I nominally agree with it), but I was just trying to answer the question as asked. Only perhaps a couple of his stories start to get into polemic territory, and even that, let me emphasize, "start"; none of them that I've read are outright political pamphlets. Mostly they're great sci-fi.
